Bloomberg Businessweek · Sep 23, 2026 · 20m 6m saved
With Anthony Scaramucci, Founder and Managing Partner of SkyBridge Capital, former White House Communications Director
Anthony Scaramucci's new book traces Donald Trump's rise to three decisions made by both parties: letting China into the World Trade Organization, fighting two wars while cutting taxes, and bailing out Wall Street.
Most accounts of Trump's rise begin with the candidate. Scaramucci's begins in November 1999, with a China trade deal he says he backed and got wrong.
"It's not a swamp. It is a gold plated hot tub."
Anthony Scaramucci, founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, on Bloomberg Businessweek, gave Trump millions of dollars, worked for him as White House communications director, and wrote a 2018 book praising him before breaking with him in 2019.
The full interview is covered here so you can skip it. 20 minutes of audio, 14 minutes of reading.
Here are the 10 arguments that matter.
Key Takeaways
Campaigning for Trump was a mistake, and going to work in his White House was a bigger one
He was fired on the 11th day, and he says Trump's own count backs him up
A fifth to a quarter of Americans now feel "economically desperational," in his words
Trump attacking his wife is what ended his support, after a TV defense went wrong
Letting China into the WTO was the first bad decision, and he says he got it wrong too
Nancy Pelosi was the one person he found who warned against it
Two wars were fought while taxes were cut, and he says that "blew a hole in the system"
The bailout rescued Wall Street and not households, which he says produced both the Tea Party and Occupy Wall Street
He will not go back into politics, because "You've got to lie when you're in politics"
1. Ten Days or Eleven
The interview opened on an argument over how long Scaramucci served as White House communications director in 2017. A host asked whether it was 10 days or 11.
He counts 11, and says the firing came on the last one
I got fired on the 11th day. It's a big day for me.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:00:28
His method is to count both ends: he started on the 21st and worked a full day on the 31st. He cited an unlikely supporter for that figure.
Trump uses the same number when he attacks him online
And by the way, when Trump is trolling me on Twitter and calling me a total loser and all that type of stuff, he says 11. I think he should be the official scorer on that, don't you?
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:00:34
The BBC still says 10
No, no, the BBC is locked in at the 10-day mark. I actually went to them and tried to make a forcible statement. And they insist that I'm only there for 10 days.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:00:59
2. Two Mistakes, Not One
A host asked whether taking the White House job was one of the wrong moves in his book's title. He said the mistake started earlier. After Jeb Bush, whom he had backed, dropped out, he accepted an offer to work for candidate Trump. He called that "a colossal mistake," and said the only bigger one was joining the White House.
Each decision was worse than the one before
So I would say that they were graduating and exponentially bigger mistakes.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:01:40
Within 24 hours it felt like a mistake, he said, because of heavy levels of dysfunction. He named Reince Priebus and Steve Bannon as the two senior aides against him.
Priebus and Bannon were openly hostile
They hated my guts.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:02:03
He said Priebus should have said so directly instead of pretending otherwise, and described his own style as the opposite.
He says he tells people to their face
I'm a front stabber. I'm not a backstabber. You know, I'll tell you to your face.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:02:14
3. A Small, Historic House
A host asked him to describe the inside of the White House. He had visited under Presidents Clinton and Obama, and had been in the Oval Office, the Roosevelt Room and the Navy mess, but his first time in the residence was while working for Trump. His main impression was size.
The president's study is smaller than Trump's rooms at Trump Tower
The Oval itself is not that big. Moreover, the President's study is probably smaller than anything that was at Trump Tower for Donald Trump.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:03:00
He said he got to know the White House Historical Association in his short time there, and that the Truman-era renovation, before Trump's recent changes, was badly needed.
The whole building was rebuilt on a steel frame
People don't remember that, but the entire White House was gutted, and a steel frame was put in, and the place was rebuilt.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:03:27
He then told what he called a human story. On his first day, after his press conference, he and Trump sat alone in the Oval Office, and he remarked on two New Yorkers, one from Queens and one from Nassau County, ending up there.
Trump told him the job had unsettled him at first
He said, you know, first time I got here, I was very unnerved by it.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:04:00
Trump then recalled a call from White House protocol telling him to meet Prime Minister Theresa May at the North Portico, and told Scaramucci he had no idea where the North Portico was.
4. The Blue-Collar Promise
A host read back a line from Scaramucci's 2018 memoir, Trump, the Blue-Collar President, which said a Trump presidency was a real chance to change things dramatically for the good. The host noted it was written after his firing.
He did not want to look like a bitter ex-employee
I certainly didn't want to be that baby or play the victim after I got fired. I was very supportive of the president up until about August of 2019.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:04:54
He said the 2018 book stands up and connects to the new one. Its argument was that the United States has a wage crisis that has left blue-collar workers out of an economy most people still see as a way up.
A fifth to a quarter of Americans have lost hope of getting ahead
But if you look at the data, there's about 20 to 25% of the people now that feel economically desperational.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:05:28
He said Trump could have been a president above party who brought that group back in.
The potential was there and was not used
He could help get deals done to bring that community back into the social contract of America, but that didn't happen. But he had the potential to do that.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:05:44
5. How the Break Happened
A host asked what changed his view. He said he was on Bill Maher's show defending Trump when Catherine Rampell asked him about Trump's remarks on "the squad," four left-leaning congresswomen whom Trump said should go back to the countries they came from. Three were born in the United States.
He called the remarks nativism and racism, on air
That's American nativism. That's a form of racism.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:06:30
He told the show his grandmother had heard the same thing.
His grandmother was told the same thing in the 1920s
My Italian-American grandmother was told that. In the 1920s, it broke her heart.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:06:42
He said Maher warned him that Trump would attack him the next day. When he replied that Trump would not be watching, Maher told him Stormy Daniels had been the first guest that night. Trump attacked him the next day, he answered, and then Trump went after his wife, Deirdre, knowing the couple had drawn up divorce papers while he was in the White House. They later reconciled.
He says Trump does things far outside the norm for a president
He's capable of doing things that are way outside the standard deviation of what's normal or an American president.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:07:36
Going after his wife ended his support
I had given him millions of dollars. I'd supported him. And you're going after my wife.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:07:43
He said he was probably one of the first former aides to speak out, and that many more now do.
6. Why the Promise Stalled
A host asked why Trump did not deliver on his first-campaign promise to bring left-behind voters into the economy. His first answer was attention span.
Trump moves on from issues too quickly
He's a distracted guy. He'll stay on a thing and then he moves to another thing very quickly.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:08:40
The promised infrastructure push never happened, he said. The 2017 tax cuts, which traditional Republicans such as Paul Ryan wanted, did damage too, along with the change to the deduction for state and local taxes (SALT), which he said hurt New York and other Democratic-leaning states.
The tax law cost Trump support among Democrats
I think that hurt his standing with the Democrats, frankly.
Anthony Scaramucci
Trump's remark about "S H I T whole countries" set back his immigration package as well. In Scaramucci's telling, the traditional Republicans of the first term probably protected the country from tariffs, from hostile rhetoric toward NATO and from a possible trade war with Canada. With the second-term staff in place, he said, those things would have happened then.
The same Republicans also blocked the economic agenda
But the Republicans also prevented some of the stuff that we're talking about in terms of bringing those people back into the integration of the economy.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:09:51
7. A Party Taken Over
A host said many Republicans are now the staff letting things happen. He said they are not the Republicans of Mitt Romney, John McCain, Adam Kinzinger, Paul Ryan and General John Kelly.
Trump's first move was to remove the party's leadership
You know, we have a decapitation strike in Iran, but the first decapitation strike for Donald Trump was removing senior Republican establishment leadership from the Republican Party.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:10:25
He described it as a takeover
This was an M & A, and he installed MAGA and the Heritage Foundation.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:10:31
Before the break, a host raised reporting on officials profiting from the administration's policies and said it felt like the swamp had not been drained.
Self-enrichment is out in the open, and he expects a reckoning
And I think it's disgusting. And I do think they'll be held accountable, though. I don't think they can get away with it.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:11:18
He added that Trump can pardon his family members and himself, but said there would be what he called "a whole big atomic blast there."
8. China and the WTO
After the break the hosts moved to the book's first decision, China's entry to the World Trade Organization. He set the scene in November 1999: the Berlin Wall had fallen, and budget limits agreed under the first President Bush and President Clinton were heading toward a surplus. China wanted permanent status, and American business wanted to give it.
He saw a huge new market, like everyone else
I saw a Chinese market opening. I saw an opportunity for us to sell goods and services to 1.3 billion people, as did the Fortune 100 CEOs. As did Wall Street.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:13:20
A host, who was at the Wall Street Journal in the run-up and helped launch a show for the Asian Wall Street Journal in Hong Kong, said everyone wanted access and she did not think it could have been stopped.
The market never opened
But that market didn't open. That market didn't open, and that's what we got wrong.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:13:50
He said his research through interviews and Wall Street Journal archives turned up one dissenter, who warned in C-SPAN speeches that China was a one-party state that had just put down Tiananmen Square in 1989.
Nancy Pelosi was the one who called it
There was one person who said it's not going to work. And I give her a lot of credit for that. That was Nancy Pelosi.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:14:13
The mistake was assuming China wanted what America wanted
And so we got it wrong because we were projecting what we wanted them to do based on our perspective and our pride in our own system.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:14:38
He still supports free trade and China's membership. His objection is that China kept the rules for an emerging market after it had grown to the size of Germany or the UK.
China grew fast behind a closed market
And they were clipping off 11%, 10% growth, had their market closed, flooded our markets.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:15:17
American consumers got cheaper goods, he said, but the cost fell on workers.
Manufacturing jobs went and wages stopped rising
But we lost a lot of our manufacturing, and we flatlined our wages for a very large group of people.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:15:28
He said China was not the whole story but was a big enough symbol of it to weigh on the people affected.
9. Wars, Tax Cuts, Bailouts
A host listed the book's other two decisions: the wars under George W. Bush, paid for without raising taxes, and the Wall Street bailout under President Obama. Scaramucci said Clinton had held Congress to budget limits. After September 11, he said, Al Gore cautioned against overreacting in the Gulf, and George Soros wrote a New York Times op-ed in November 2001 warning against playing into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Soros warned against overreaction
He wrote an op-ed in the New York Times in November of 2001 to be careful. Don't overreact and play into Osama bin Laden's hands.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:16:33
Citing Lawrence Wright's book on 9/11, he said bin Laden's aim was to draw the US into costly wars and a loss of civil liberties, and that the Patriot Act delivered the second.
The two wars cost trillions
And we ended up spending $ 8 trillion on those two wars.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:16:59
Taxes were cut in 2001 before the October invasion of Afghanistan, he said, and again early in 2003 before the Iraq war began in March.
Cutting taxes while going to war broke the budget
And that blew a hole in the system.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:17:16
He tied it together as stagnant wages, then deficit spending that fed inflation, then a weaker currency.
The dollar's loss of value hits wage earners
And guys, you know this, but the U.S. dollar has lost 28% of its value since December of 2019. And so that's a huge problem for wage earners.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:17:29
The third piece, he said, was the bailout.
The rescue left out households
There's nothing in the allocation for poor or middle-class families or people that need credit card relief or rental relief.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:17:41
A host said her husband's view was that the government should have paid off everyone's mortgages. He said the point was fairness, not mortgages.
A one-sided bailout produced both protest movements
If you're going to bail one group out without bailing the other group out, you're going to make that group feel that it was unfair and you're going to engender the Tea Party movement and you're going to engender Occupy Wall Street.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:17:59
10. Room for Hope
Asked for the book's answer, he said the country has recovered from worse before.
The country resets itself about every 80 years
We got ourselves out of the Civil War. We got ourselves out of the Depression. Every 80 years, we sort of dunk ourselves.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:18:25
He said the country is at that turning point now, that many capable people are getting involved, and that government needs reform to work better, run by people focused on what is right for the country rather than on left or right.
He wants a technocrat's approach
You know, sort of the Mike Bloomberg technocratic way of running things. And I'm hopeful for that.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:18:49
He described the book as a template for what went wrong and said the problems can be fixed.
Even the deficit can be fixed
It's resolvable, including the deficit.
Anthony Scaramucci · ▶ 00:19:04
Bonus Insights
He will not go back into politics
Asked yes or no whether he would return, he said it is not for him.
It's not for me. You've got to lie when you're in politics. I don't feel like it.
Anthony Scaramucci
Markets and crypto were promised but not reached
Before the break a host said the second half might cover markets and some crypto. The second half stayed on the book, and neither came up.
His complaint about Priebus was the pretense
He said Reince Priebus should just say he hates you instead of acting like Richie Cunningham, the wholesome lead of the sitcom Happy Days.
Scaramucci's case is that Trump's rise came from voters whose wages stalled after three bipartisan decisions (China's entry to the WTO, two wars fought on tax cuts, and a bailout that skipped households), and that the same problems, deficit included, can still be fixed by less partisan government.
Products, Companies & Tools Mentioned
SkyBridge Capital (The investment firm he founded and runs as managing partner)
World Trade Organization (China's permanent status in 1999 is the first of the book's three decisions; he still thinks China belongs in it)
The Heritage Foundation (What he says Trump installed, with MAGA, after removing the party's traditional leadership)
White House Historical Association (The group he got to know during his short time in the White House)
The Wall Street Journal (He went through its archives researching the China chapter; a host worked there during the run-up to China's WTO entry)
C-SPAN (Where Nancy Pelosi gave the speeches warning against China's WTO entry)
BBC (Still says he served 10 days rather than 11, he said)
Real Time with Bill Maher (The show where his answer on "the squad" started his break with Trump)
Books & Resources Mentioned
All the Wrong Moves: How Three Catastrophic Decisions Led to the Rise of Trump – Anthony Scaramucci (His new book, on China and the WTO, the two wars and tax cuts, and the Wall Street bailout)
Trump, the Blue-Collar President – Anthony Scaramucci (His 2018 memoir, which argued Trump could bring left-behind workers back into the economy)
The Rest Is Politics: US (The podcast the hosts said he co-hosts)
The Looming Tower – Lawrence Wright ("Lawrence Wright's book about 9-11," which he cited on bin Laden's aim of drawing the US into war)
George Soros's New York Times op-ed, November 2001 (Warned the US not to overreact after September 11)
The USA PATRIOT Act (His example of the civil liberties the US gave up after September 11)
Watch the full interview
🟣 Apple Podcasts | 🔗 Episode page
If this was worth your time, send it to someone who has to have a view on this.
Get the latest market chatter as it happens: